The Customer Experience Podcast

Direct mail used to be a highly “spray-and-pray” activity. On top of that, printers might take weeks or months to send offline collateral. But with the oversaturation of digital touchpoints today, direct mail has come back with a vengeance—which is why Michael McCarthy founded Inkit. Inkit has upgraded the direct mail game, allowing you to integrate your CRM with direct mail and automate offline artifacts in real time. In this episode, Michael shares some of the best use cases he’s seen in direct mail campaigns today.

“Obsession is the complete micromanagement of the customer experience.” According to Matt Knee, Founder and President of MyCompanyWorks and author of the book Startups Made Simple, obsession is a superpower. Steve Jobs, Herb Kelleher, and Jeff Bezos each have/had it. There aren’t a lot of great companies whose founder wasn’t obsessed with seeing their vision of the perfect customer experience come to life. Listen in to hear Matt share why obsession is so important and to hear about another superpower he thinks is even more important.

Whatever job you do, whatever industry you’re in, people are going to tell stories about their experiences with you. It’s been said for a long time that customers that have a negative experience with a business are two to three times more likely to leave a review of that business than customers that have a good one. A couple more stats that prove how important good customer experience is: 88 percent of people trust online reviews as much as they trust their best friends’ recommendations. 80 percent of people choose to go elsewhere if they read bad reviews of your business online. Needless to say, if your customers aren’t telling positive stories about you, it’s impacting you. Whether you know it or not.

What’s a surefire strategy to solidify your reputation for offering a superior customer experience? We’ll give you a hint. It involves tacos. Jordan Olivero is the director of customer success at Swimlane. He visited our podcast recently to discuss the power of moments, doing things that don't scale but doing them anyway, giftology, and being your own PR firm. Olivero read The Power of Moments a year ago and it transformed the way he looked at the customer journey. They broke down the things that are common to any memorable lasting impression. Those are the places where you have an opportunity to make a moment that really lasts. In customer experience,the moments that are particularly powerful or memorable often have one of these three traits: They are pits in the journey. They are peaks in the journey. They’re at a transition in the beginning and the end.

Sometimes, we get it backwards. We focus on our KPIs, or what we think the customer needs or wants. We deliver on our expectations, … and then the customer leaves. Because we missed their desired outcome. How do we become masters of achieving the desired outcome? There’s no one better to discuss this issue than Jonathan Bolton, our Sr. VP of Operations here at BombBomb. Jonathan nearly single-handedly scaled our customer success organization from a solo act to a 30-person entity, creating amazing customer experiences every step of the way. He jumped on this episode of The Customer Experience Podcast, and we had an in-depth conversation about ensuring every customer experience is achieving the goals it should.

Trust matters when it comes to customer experience. People line up at the Apple Store’s Genius Bar in part because they’ve come to trust that they will get a great customer experience. Whether you’re a B2B or B2C, how can you create trust with your customers? To find the answers, I spoke with Charles H. Green, CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. He's the author of Trust-Based Selling: Using Customer Focus and Collaboration to Build Long-Term Relationships and The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust. For Charles, you create trust by focusing on building a long-term relationship instead of focusing on the current transaction. Charles suggests that you engage in active listening to make your prospects and customers feel like you understand how they’re feeling.

You've got a hundred days to make customers for life. Do you know what tools to employ to guarantee they’ll stay? Joey Coleman does. He is a speaker and writer who's deeply steeped in the customer experience. He's the founder and chief experience composer at Design Symphony [TK: there is no URL for “Design Symphony” - this link is to his consulting website joeycoleman.com], and the author of Never Lose a Customer Again, Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days. Coleman visited our podcast recently and shared his secrets to converting customers for life.

If you think a checked box on a survey or net promoter score is an accurate customer satisfaction metric, you’re in trouble. So says Samantha Stone, the founder and CMO of the Marketing Advisory Network. She's the author of Unleash Possible: A Marketing Playbook That Drives Sales, and a regular conference speaker. Stone has worked in marketing, product marketing, partner marketing, and brings a great wealth of experience to this podcast. Abstractly speaking, customer experience is any interaction between a brand/vendor and buyers, prospects, or customers. It can involve placing an order, or taking receipt of a delivered item. It could be a conversation, or an event one attended. There's a second definition in many organizations. Because those interactions happen in so many different places, they create a function that is responsible for the intersection of customers across different touch points. That's really important because otherwise you see inconsistent interactions. Sales operates differently than marketing, which operates differently than support, which operates differently than order fulfillment, etc.

Your sales strategy is as much science as art. The secret is to understand how to improve the way customers buy, renew, and get retained. Jeremey Donovan, senior vice president of sales strategy at SalesLoft, the leading sales engagement platform, is an expert in sales strategy. His top level priority, especially in B2B, is about ROI. A prospect needs to trust that you are the right partner to help them achieve whatever their most pressing business initiative is. We discussed: The Definition of Sales Success Finding a Needle in a Haystack True Personalization Pays Off What to Do What Not to Do

Like it or not, your customer’s experience is your brand. How do you make your branding win in the long term? To find the answers, we spoke with David Brier, Chief Gravity Defyer at DBD International, a branding consultancy and agency. He's the author of Brand Intervention: 33 Steps to Transform the Brand You Have into the Brand You Need.